Thursday, March 19, 2009

from Prague to Brussels

I thought I would wait until the bus would get to Germany. I was enjoying the torment of keeping them in the head and promised myself would hold them on until Germany. But then it was the fear which has always come true. They just drip away…

At one point, some long time ago, I realized I was not unique at all. I remember it was a disappointing feeling. But then it was also that I found myself more open. Because I already know how others were. They were just like me.

Now listening to my small iPod that Christina brought me, carrying that bag and the jacket I wore today, myself reminds me of you. All the way we were driving I was feeling reshuffled as each composition was so different from the next. I felt alive.

It was also because of The Mandarins. I am being reaffirmed that I want more. The skin around me is so tight and also so fluid making you both rigid and slightly movable inside, confirming there is a possibility to move more. I’m not sure if I put this right. That energy which is maybe beyond my capacity is torturing me pleasantly. I want to do drugs. I want to transform together with any tiny detail of experience. She is so much like me but also so distant. The approaching, pushing away the distance is so desirable but also so dangerous. Like a pleasant hazardous play.The love that I desire to bare in myself, which I might be bearing anyhow, is the life.

The other day I watched a film by a Polish director ‘Yodok Stories’. I’ve become extremely sensitive to the unhappiness of others. This film is about concentration camps in North Korea. Unbelievable, how unimaginative cruelty can exist in the modern world, which we call postmodernism, or info wave or computer era, or whatever. Everything is just nothing to what is happening in this country of over a dozen million inhabitants. In these concentration camps, as told by the witnesses now residing in South Korea, people are tortured inhumanly because their loyalty towards the leader has been doubted. Without trial, only because a member of their family either escaped from the country, or said there is not enough rice for everybody, was captivated. Some would die of hunger there; some would eat a child to survive. The guy was saying, someone had confessed he had killed a 5 year old child, thrown away the head and eaten his hands and legs. One woman was telling, in the camps, children had big bellies because of malnourishment. Mothers had to find pregnant rats and get the baby rats out of their stomach, because they had no fur yet, and to feed them to their children. She said these kinds of rats were rare and children who ate unborn rats did not have big bellies.

For those who had to be executed, there were special cabins. They are narrow cabins for one person to fit in. But they are not as tall as a human being. That means, whoever is sent inside, has to stand there slightly bent. This is the execution. They have to stand there like that until they die.

There was one boy who had escaped North Korea through crossing the river towards China. The first thing he said that surprised him was that someone smiled at him. He said at home I would never let myself express my feelings. I imagined, or at least I tried to imagine, how it is to live never, never expressing what you feel. With the camps, the stories were told in such a calm way. The way you tell something that is very common. And these stories are the most (I cannot even give it a name) I have ever heard or felt.

Another thing was that those who would manage to escape to China, would be captured by Chinese and sent back to North Korea, where they were naturally sent to the camps. Neglect has such a major part in all our minds. I regret once in a while, probably only when the humanity’s injustice opens my eyes, why I not an activist. Such a stupid thought. A thought of temporary convenience.

I was happy driving sitting in the bus, listening to music, looking ahead of me at the road and thinking of different things that had inspired me recently. I should have seen Prague in warmer weather. It had this spirit of waking and walking and sitting on a bench on the river side. I saw Andy Warhol’s motion picture.

“I cound never finally figure out if more things happened in the sixties because there was more awake time for them to happen in (since so many people were on amphetamine), or if people started taking amphetamine because there were so many things to do that they needed to have more awake time to do them in…” – Andy Warhol.

So one video depicted his partner, a man, sleeping for several hours. So that if the sleep would ever become extinct, this would be the evidence that this is how it was. Then there were portraits of other people, most beautiful women and most beautiful men, as he called those video installations. Then there were couples kissing. I liked the idea of the kissing sequence to be a revenge of the new movie industry rule not to show couples kissing for more than 3 seconds. Here they kiss for three minutes. And also there was a man’s face being given a blow job. The face and the title of video Blow Job create the coherency. Each of the two would have no meaning without the other. I admire the idea of context out of fragments.

The definitions make life simple to judge, but can be an easy mislead, or just an assumption, which stores so much more beyond.